


and i adore the way the light hits your face, but i hit harder, darling, and i love that too

by Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Daredevil (TV), Punisher (Comics), The Wire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, BDSM, Dom/sub, F/M, Girls Can Get Jackycardia Too, Maria Castle as a BAU profiler AU, Maria and Frank have prior consent, Past Sexual Abuse, during sex, regarding the use of inhibition-lowering drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 03:35:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/pseuds/Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra
Summary: Maria Castle is shot in the line of duty, but this doesn't stop her and Frank from having a healthy sex life while she recovers.





	and i adore the way the light hits your face, but i hit harder, darling, and i love that too

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [help me find joy in my subjugation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11637141) by [Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/pseuds/Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra). 



It happens when they're working a case in Baltimore. 

They've been there before--giving a profile of a serial killer who'd killed homeless and prostitute men and women--but this time they were much more sure that there was a specific, active serial killer. Cops' husbands and adult sons had been disappearing and the department being sent mutilated pieces back, one by one by one. The BAU was called in, and the task force set up for the crime was much more twitchy than normal. It had only been some of the team's familiarity with the various narcotics, pawnshop, and homicide detectives and the force lieutenant that made them cooperative. 

They'd formed and given the profile, and were now searching hard for people who fit it. Unfortunately, the taskforce seemed to regard them as fortune-tellers, and it was hard to work the profile.

Idris was in quiet, fierce discussion with Kalia, who was growling to them about how she wanted heads to roll for this. Idris agreed wholeheartedly; nobody could go after police's children and husbands like this without repercussions. Hotch was exploring the possibility with the roundtable that it could be man or a woman whose son or husband, or both, who had been killed by the Baltimore PD, and Lieutenant Daniels with the regal little cat daemon was pointing out that none of the drug traffickers or kingpins they had gone after were likely to be stupid enough to enact this sort of revenge. The other detectives were raising the possibility of it being an assassin named Wee-Bey who had recently gotten out of prison, but then Maria pointed out that it was highly unlikely a man with an octopus daemon would be able to not leave even a single drop of water at any of the scenes of the crime, who had all been meticulously combed over and controlled.

Hermia muttered something to Dalia, who then came over to the little conference. "We're thinking it could be a more singular criminal," she said. "Not someone used to being arrested or in organized crime, but rather someone who's only been arrested maybe once, or someone whose son or husband died while being mistaken for a criminal."

There was a sudden shock, and then Kalia recoiled. "It's her," she said, and Jimmy frowned. She ran over and told him, and he shook his head. "Can't be," he said. "She's not--she's a good person. Her husband, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all--"

"What happened?" Hotch addressed McNulty. "Who is it?"

"It's--" he sighed, "It might be the wife of an officer who was killed a few years ago. Her husband got mistaken for a dangerous suspect by one of our now retired officers."

"She was distraught," Bunk, a homicide detective with a bird daemon, said slowly. 

"Yeah, because her fucking husband died after being shot because of some police's shoddy work," McNulty snapped, and looked abashed at a scolding stare. "He was one of ours, and he was a fucking wiz at those phone codes, but he should never have touched a gun, we all know that. She's a nice woman, she's been through hell..."

"And it was her," Kalia said. "You know it, I know it. She has a tiny insect daemon, one of those bees, and she didn't look right ever since her son died six months ago."

"Her son died as well?" Hermia and Idris asked Kalia simultaneously. 

"Yeah, he got some kind of aneurysm," Kalia said. "We investigated just in case of poisoning or something, but it was natural causes."

Idris looked at Hermia and the rest of her team's daemons. They all looked grim. "That's the stressor," she said. "She must have felt betrayed enough by her husband getting shot, and then dying, and now she feels like she's lost everything and has nothing to lose except her chance at revenge."

"Could she be capable of this type of violence?" Hermia asked Kalia. 

"I'll get Garcia to run background," Morgan said, calling her. Garcia's daemon Aquarius answered instead of her herself, his voice chirping, "Garcia and Aquarius here, how may the house of genius and sexy help you?"

"Baby girl, can you get me everything on a woman named--?"

"Linda Rholman."

"Linda Rholman, a Baltimore PD officer's widow?" Morgan asked.

"Sure, let me just see..." Garcia said, typing frantically. "Okay, so, Linda Rholman with a fox daemon named Tyrwinn, settled aged fifteen, had a single mother but she died of leukemia aged thirty-five, when Linda was seventeen. Married to one Officer Archer Park for twenty years at the time of his death due to a gunshot wound to the head a year before, an accidental shooting by another police officer, a Roland Pryzbylewski, who mistook her husband for a suspect in a homicide. Huh...Pryzbylewski screwed up, failed to properly identify himself according to the records, and then he ended up retired posthaste due to the incident. Oh..yeah, six months ago Rholman's son Robert Park died of a sudden idiosyncratic aneurysm, really suddenly, wow--she came back home from her job to find him dead inside his bed, but she didn't know he wasn't just asleep for a day. Traumatic as anything."

"That's her. What's her job?"

"She works currently...well, at nothing, she hasn't had a job since her son died. She worked before in a...wow, I didn't even know that was a job. Apparently, she helped dismember corpses for people who want a straight cremation to make it easier to fit them all in in one go. Ick- _y_."

Idris looked at Maria, and Maria nodded sharply. "You got an address?" she asked Garcia.

"Oh hello, my new favorite profiler," she said. "Yes," and she repeated it, and Maria and Idris got up immediately.

"We're not getting an arrest warrant on a hunch," Daniels said bluntly. "We'll need more evidence first."

"That's fine," Maria said, grabbing her jacket. "We'll go and try and get inside her house," she told Hotch. "She'll be able to empathize more with me than anyone else here."

"Why?" McNulty asked.

"My husband's going on his second tour in six months, I'm pregnant, and I'd want to dismember people too," she said, putting on her jacket.

"I can't send you out to make a dangerous arrest," Hotch said.

She stared at him. "She's drugging and roofie-ing them to keep them compliant, she's probably not experienced in violence," she said. "I can make it seem like she's coming just down to talk. Or like that we might let her go."

"If she's not completely delusional, she probably knows that she's not going to get anything besides the death penalty," Reid said. "She may want to commit suicide by cop. We know these types of UNSUBs."

"Fine, then you come with me," Maria said, rolling her eyes. Bede jumped a little bit, staring at her with his huge eyes. "But anyone who looks like a police officer--maybe except for McNulty--if they show up she's going to start shooting out of her window."

"Alright," McNulty said, and got up to come with her.

* * *

 

The thing that got to Maria was that she was wearing an  _actual fucking vest_. It was hidden beneath her jacket and shirt, and Idris's blended into his black fur easily. He stalked around the side of the house, sniffing furiously, and came back, growling about the stench of morphine and fentanyl and dead bodies. Maria made sure her sidearm was hidden, and knocked on the door.

"Linda?" she said when the woman came to the door. She looked thin, haunted, her daemon leaning weakly on her leg. "Hi, I'm Maria. Jimmy McNulty said you needed to talk to someone?"

"I'm, I'm fine," Linda said, looking disoriented in the way that meant she hadn't had a conversation with another human in too long. Maria was familiar with it from Frank and Athena. "I'm okay."

"Yeah?" Maria said. "I know you feel terrible. I came over to see if there's anything I can do for you, you know? I'm new in town, and my husband is about to go on his second deployment, and so I'd like it if I could get to know my new neighbors better."

Idris by her legs was doing his best friendly-dog routine, wagging his tail and trying to sniff at her daemon. Tyrwinn didn't even walk over touch noses or sniff at him; that was a bad sign.

"N-neighbors? Nobody in the street's selling.." Linda said slowly, still looking disoriented. She was wearing a nightgown at three in the afternoon. "I don't--"

"I'd just like to come inside, maybe I could clean out your fridge or sit with you and knit?" Maria said with a wide, charming smile. "Can I come in and have a look."

"No? No, n-no," Linda said. "I, I can't."

"Not even a cup of coffee?" Maria asked with a smile. "Just to see?"

"Okay. One, a cup of coffee. But just you," Linda said. "Jimmy, he's, he's nice but no. Not today."

Maria gave a hand signal behind her back and smiled. "Of course," and she followed Linda inside.

The dumb part was that it happened a whole five minutes after that, and that Maria couldn't remember those five minutes clearly. Just a sudden strange pain in her arm and then her stomach and one in her ass, like period cramps, and a growl, and Idris jumped and bit down on the fox and killed it, ripping it apart with his strong jaws, and then Linda collapsed like a puppet with her strings cut and Reid and McNulty were running in, Kalia racing and baying and Bede jumping in, helping to grab a thick towel to hold over the blood--

* * *

 

Maria woke up in the hospital.

"Oh, fuck," she mumbled. She was on a bed, being wheeled, and Idris was running next to her, and that meant only one thing. "The--the baby--"

"Your baby's fine, the vest protected the fetus," a woman in pink scrubs was saying. "It's okay, we've checked, just a bruise--"

"Baby, my baby?" she asked again, because she had to be sure, her hand wandering down and it hurt sharply, but the baby--

"The baby's okay, but you need to stay still," the woman was saying. "You need to be still, and calm--"

"The, the UNSUB?" Maria asked next.

"We sent her to hell," Idris snarled, running next to her.

She grinned a wolfish grin, and fell back asleep, satisfied.

* * *

 

She woke up again and Frank was there. 

He was sitting, drinking coffee from the thermos she'd gotten him, a plaid one she had given him as his first birthday present from her. It had been a pretty piss-poor present in her mind, but Frank  _hated_ affection sometimes, pushed away from what he wanted, and she had thought that something as ruthlessly practical would overcome his aversion to luxury. 

He looked at her, eyes full of his usual intense love, and Athena was--she craned her neck, and confirmed what she felt. Athena was curled up with Idris in a little daemon-bed nearby, and she reached out and tangled her fingers in Idris's fur.

"Baby?" she asked Frank.

"She's fine," Frank said quietly. "They checked every day. She's fine. No harm done."

Maria sagged in relief. "Good," she said, and lapsed into silence. She felt utterly tired, despite the fact that she had just been asleep. Then something occurred to her, and she snickered. "My big belly, finally good for something," she said with a giggle.

Frank smiled at her, faintly. "You thought it was a good op?"

"Thought it was good," she said, nodding. "Old lady, thought she'd empathize with me. Husband died, son died. She wasn't...a psychopath, or a sadist. Just lost everybody. _Everybody_."

Frank looked at her, and nodded, and they both understood the cost of the job: sometimes you made bad calls, and people died. When you got lucky, it wasn't you. No matter how hard you tried, you'd fuck up eventually. It wasn't acceptable, but it was inevitable.

Maria blew out air through her mouth, and wiped over her face with her IV hand. "Oh, fuck," she muttered. "Who--did  _you_ call my parents and my sisters?"

"Not the first call," Frank said, darkly amused. "Skinny kid and drunk man handled that. Other calls, I handled."

"Christ," she said. "How were they?"

"Parents fucked up. Bibi especially. Cried about your job for fifteen minutes," Frank sighed. "Sisters needed to know you and the baby were alive. Going to recover. Carmen got worried about me too."

Maria quirked an eyebrow at that. She couldn't imagine Frank being incapable of handling anything apart from her or their children dead; he was such a steady rock, a deeply strong man from somewhere inside himself, like a mountain that held together and rose and rose despite a crack down the middle deep into the molten earth. 

"She's nice. They're all flying out tonight," Frank said. "Probably gonna try and talk you into retirement."

"Jesus fuckin' christ," Maria swore again. "Fuck no. I won't-- _fuck_ no."

"I'll be the goon squad," Frank said. 

"Nah, I'll handle it," she said. "Just--when they first get here, pretend there's some doctor's limit on visits from people other than my husband. Make sure they get a goddamn  _ho-_ tel and not a motel. Bibi's stupid about that. You said--I'm gonna be okay?"

"Yeah. Ass shot's not hard to heal with rehab, leg might mean pins in a few weeks but back to work," Frank said. "Got lucky, no scatter rounds."

"She wouldn't have any in the house," Maria explained to him. "She mailed the heads back to the police with a single gunshot, mimicking how her husband got killed. Stupid shit," she clarified for Frank. "It was--"

Just then, McNulty came in, looking disheveled--well, moreso than usual, along with Reid, who looked starched stiff, which meant the exact same thing for him. Kalia had visible crusted drool in her jowls, and Bede looked freshly groomed.

"Hey," she said. "You okay?"

"Huh?" McNulty asked. "We called your folks, including your husband, he got here within two hours."

She raised an eyebrow at Frank, who shrugged. "I sped a bit."

She whacked him with her good hand, annoyed. "I told you to stop doing that shit! I don't want you to die because you wanted to get somewhere faster!"

"You were shot and in the hospital."

"I wasn't dead and you're not my trauma surgeon," she told him irritably. "What were  _you_ going to do for me, anyway?"

He shrugged, a little smirk on his face, and she wanted to punish him for that later, flog him and maybe fig him too until he squirmed and begged for mercy--or didn't. Frank either loved losing or hated it in a distinctly unfun way.

"Anyway," she said. "They're coming here?"

"Yeah, all of them," McNulty said, and Reid looked pushed to the side by his sheer presence. "You seriously got three moms and two dads?"

"Yeah," she said. "I only call one Mom and one Dad, for clarity's sake, but yeah."

"How's that work?" he asked, genuinely curious. 

"Ask them to draw you a diagram when they get here," she said, amused. "They love explaining that to monos."

"'Monos'?"

"Monogamous people. They hadn't started calling people that until three years ago, when they joined that group," she said with a sigh. "And before you ask, the main drama will be that they want me to retire from being an FBI agent, or decide to work at a desk or be a meter maid, or something."

"Wasn't it real estate agent before?" Frank asked. "Or infomertial actress?"

Bede snorted out loud, and she nodded at him. "Yeah, it's pretty stupid. I'm not going to stop."

"And he's not--?" McNulty asked, gesturing to her husband, and Maria wanted to shoot him.

She gave him a cool look, and said slowly and coldly, articulating each syllable, "Jimmy McNulty, my husband Frank Castle does not actually run my life. If he had any desire to want me to change jobs, I would take that into consideration and then make my own decision for myself without his feelings superseding mine. As it is, he does not want me to change careers, because he is not in fact a fucking idiot, and he understands that I am not the kind of woman who would be satisfied or happy with a domestic life or even a more safe and calm career life, and furthermore that any attempts to guilt or pressure me to take up such a life would result in his head ending up fed to pigs at my parents' friends' farms."

Frank was almost snickering by the end, and McNulty looked taken aback. "Jesus. I wasn't--"

"I do not like people implying that Frank runs a damn thing in this marriage," Maria said. "Many women, and many of them like me, are trapped in marriages where their husbands have unfair power, it is true. But I am not one of them and I do not want a single person to have the false impression otherwise. Neither I nor Frank would tolerate any such disrespect to each other."

"It's true, I don't organize shit," Frank said. "And I wouldn't ask her to act tamed, or something."

"I would rip your throat out," Idris said in a low voice from where he was ensconced in the basket, yawning.

"Yeah, I'd deserve it," Athena said happily, baring her throat. 

McNulty shook his head. "Anyway, we got her clean. Your daemon killed hers, and the house was littered with forensic evidence everywhere apart from the kitchen and her husband's and son's rooms."

"She preserved them. Tried to keep them in her life," Maria said slowly, and yawned. "Gonna come by and take my statement later?" 

"Not me, Bunk," McNulty said. "Him and Lester Freamont. That okay?"

"Yeah, that's good," she said. "Let me--gotta take a nap first," and she closed her eyes, calm and trusting Frank to usher them out and reassure Reid. He was sweet, all gangly and unsure of his ruthless intelligence, and she almost wanted to mother him sometimes.

* * *

 

Predictably, her family came, parents first, and they cried and begged her to change jobs, their daemons crowding Athena almost right out of the bed-basket. Bibi almost keened at the sight of Maria's wound dressings, obsessed over tiny details of the shooting, sobbed when Maria needed help to go to the bathroom and had to call a nurse. Bobby brought out statistics on shootings of FBI agents, and Mama and Dad each brought up how maybe the doctors were wrong and the baby was hurt, or would die, or would be premature now, until Maria just wanted to kill them to make them  _shut the fuck up_.

Then they were ushered out, and the homicide detectives ushered in. Maria gave her statement, and then Hotch came in, reassuring her it was a good kill for her and that the Baltimore police department was glad to have caught the killer, wanted to name some award after her. She shrugged and then napped afterwards, only to get woken up for her vitals and for some clear, shitty broth for dinner, and then it was late at night and she was exhausted, but also buzzing, a little...horny.

She smirked at Frank, and he raised an eyebrow. She nodded at the floor and told him, softly, "Get down on your knees, Frank."

"The good drugs makin' you horny?" he asked her, sinking down to his knees anyway as Idris ruthlessly cuddled Athena into submission. 

"There's a missing 'ma'am' there," she said.

"I'm so sorry, ma'am. Is it the good drugs making you horny, ma'am?" Frank said, bratty little shit that he was sometimes, and Maria reached over as he shuffled closer until she smacked him hard with her IV hand. 

"Shush, boy," she said, swatting him again. "You should have some respect for your betters."

He inaudibly groaned at that, unbearably turned on already, she could see it. 

"Get over here and lick my feet," she whispered to, wriggling them in the hospital socks. They were so comfortable, she vowed to steal them with her when she left. "The soles too, Frank, honey."

His eyes burned as they locked with hers as he knelt and licked her feet, little kitten licks followed by laving of his tongue across the plastic bumps, murmuring, "I'm so sorry, ma'am. I will have some respect for my betters, ma'am."

"You'd better," she said, and saw a flicker of something in Athena--insecurity. "You will, honey," she added. "Do you know what you are?"

He shook his head, the room suddenly full of tension, static hanging down over them.

"You're my good boy," she said softly, letting her face curl into a smile. "Mine. My good, good boy. All mine."

Frank shivered. "All mine," she told him again, twitching her fingers and he came up to her obediently, kneeling by her bedside. "My good boy. Nobody else is ever allowed to have you," she said fiercely. "Nobody allowed to take you from me. I would never let them."

"Never, ma'am?" he whispered, and something felt very important between them, a string pulled so tight you could walk on it. Maria heard chords, faintly. 

"Never," she whispered to him, cupping his face, gazing into his eyes. "I'd kill them. I'd hunt them down and I'd kill them and take you back home, wash you off, make you mine again and I'd feed their bodies to pigs. I'd rip their throat out with my  _teeth_ ," and he shivered, pupils blown.

(Across the room, Idris murmured to Athena that they'd track down anyone foolish enough to try for weeks on end, no sleep, and it would be a bloodbath for the ages when they caught them.  _When_ , not  _if_.)

"I couldn't stop you from getting hurt, ma'am," he murmured, and straightened up, hands behind his back. "Please, ma'am, please do me the kindness of punishing me."

"No," she said firmly, shaking her head. " _No._ Not your job. My job, my colleagues' job. Not yours. I don't protect you at work and you don't protect me, Frank."

He looked unhappy in his own way, but didn't argue.

"No. But I will punish you for being sassy earlier, and for speeding," she said. "I'll do it full-blown later, when we're nice and home, but right now, get up here and bend over my legs."

His eyes were wide. "Ma'am, the people--"

"If you don't want them seeing you spanked, maybe you shouldn't do what I tell you will get you spanked," she said, smirking a bit as he squirmed and then braced himself. "Failing that, you can try being nice and quiet."

Frank stared at her, not saying fuck off or that she was too high, and bent over her legs. Very distantly, she knew it was perhaps the morphine in her IV that was making her so...brazen, but it wasn't anything that she wouldn't have done tipsy or perhaps even after coming home from a cherished kill, anyway, so it hardly bothered her.

"Good boy," she said, and pulled down his pants and spanked him. Hard, not loud, and he was focused so hard on being silent that she grinned and went at it, her clit tingling and heat pooling in her belly until the heartbeat monitor exploded in a shower of beeping and a nurse was rushing towards the room, and she pulled her arm back and Frank was sitting back in the chair, dressed, in a fraction of a second.

"Mrs Castle!" the nurse said, running in, and took stock of the situation. "What--"

"We were talking about taxes," Maria lied smoothly. "And, well. Also the hospital bill and how to yell at the insurance company. You know. Things like that?"

Frank mouthed incredulously at her  _things like that?_ And she decided to not just fig him at home, but to rub some diluted IcyHot on his balls later that day to punish him. He'd squirm and slowly go into that incredible place where he endured pain and humiliation and just  _took_ it and came out stronger than ever, and she'd love it.

"Uh," the nurse said. "Okay. But you're not healthy enough for things that get your heartrate up, so keep that down."

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "Yeah. We'll do that."

The nurse gave them a scolding look and left to go to another patient's room. 

Frank and Maria exchanged a look, and they burst into laughter together, Athena and Idris howling too.

**Author's Note:**

> Maria Castle's daemon Idris is a wolfdog, a labrador/wolf mix.
> 
> Frank Castle's daemon Athena is a wolfdog, a pitbull/wolf mix.
> 
> Jimmy McNulty's daemon Kalia is a bloodhound.
> 
> Daniels's daemon Cordelia is a serval.
> 
> Wee-Bey's daemon Latiesha is a blue-ringed octopus.
> 
> Spencer Reid's daemon Bede is a male aye-aye.
> 
> Derek Morgan's daemon Dalia is a hedgehog.
> 
> Hotchner's daemon Hermia is an all-black German shepherd.
> 
> Garcia's daemon Aquarius is a bush baby.


End file.
